Circle With The End (Labo Records)

 “Circle With The End” is the second demo of this Belgium band formed in 1995. In these more than ten years Aetherium released just a demo called “Herfst” in 2003, before this last one. The music this quintet delivers could be labelled as an experimental Black/Doom Metal with some melodic, minor atmospheric elements and even some small Death Metal inspired sections, where the mid to slow paced velocities defines the entire demo. The guitars range between the sharpened Black Metal styled riffing and the low and crawling Doom/Death Metal oriented riffs resulting in a quite interesting contrast while the mid to slow paced drumming doesn’t shine but does its job. The vocal are mostly desperate infernal Black Metal shrieks, but is accompanied in several sections by all kind of vocalizations, ranging from clean singed and spoken male and female vocals, Death Metal grunts to some annoying shrieks (that can be heard, in its maximum expression, at the first track “The Fallen Prince”). The music here shows some potential, but is opaqued by constant brakes that, more than varying the whole composition, disarm the main structure making it extremely hard to follow. The production is pretty flat and weak sounding but legible. As you can see “Circle With The End” is far from becoming a classic, but still shows some good ideas, maybe with better production and less experimentation Aetherium could become a name to consider in the future…who knows. (AP)